How To Take Vitamin E: Benefits, Dose & Side Effects

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Vitamin E is one of the major vitamins that exist naturally in foods. In this video, I want to talk about what vitamin E is, its roles in the body and how to get enough of it, which means we will talk about vitamin E supplementation at the end of this video.

Let’s start by discussing what vitamin E is and why we need it.

Vitamin E is an essential dietary nutrient, meaning we need to get it from food and cannot produce it ourselves. Even though it is often thought of as a single nutrient, it’s actually a group of eight fat-soluble compounds with powerful antioxidant effects. All of them are fat-soluble, meaning they are better absorbed when combined with fat and they can also be stored in fat tissue in the body.

The RDA for vitamin E is 15 mg daily (or 22 international units, IU). Vitamin E has several different functions in the body. The main ones are:

Act as Antioxidant:

Similar to vitamin C, vitamin E can act as a powerful antioxidant in the body, and studies have linked a higher vitamin E intake to reduced markers of oxidative stress as well as higher antioxidant defenses. Bascially, you can see it as a protection the body against inflammation and stress of all sorts.

Cell Membrane integrity:

Even though vitamin E is only a minor component of the cell membrane, so the outer wall of the cell, it may plays a significant role in its integrity. Once it enter the cell membrane, it appears to fix itself in place to stabilize the membrane and give it structure. As you can imagine, without Vitamin E as a stabilizer, cell membranes can more easily rupture, which ultimately leads to a quicker cell death and all the negative side effects such as inflammation and disease that come with it.


Neurological Functioning

And lastly, Vitamin E is required for the proper functioning of the central nervous system. It helps avoid neurological problems, such as difficulty coordinating movements and speech, loss of reflexes in the legs , and burning/tingling sensation in the extremities. While the exact role of vitamin E in this isn’t entirely clear, the reason is probably that its antioxidant properties protects the brain and nervous system against disease.


Let's now talk about high vitamin e foods and its best sources. In general, the foods highest in vitamin e are plant oil, seeds and nuts. Individual foods include sunflower seeds and almonds especially when roasted as well as canola oil. However, by fat the best source is Wheat germ oil with over 150 mg of vitamin e per 100g. Also red palm oil, which is not the same as white palm oil that most people are familiar with, is a very good vitamin e source.

This then brings me to vitamin e supplementation. If you decide to supplement, I recommend you get a quality vitamin e product. Unfortunately, most of the products you find only include alpha-tocopherol, which is only one of the eight forms of natural vitamin e. This is done for cost reasons and because alpha-tocopherol appears to be the most active form. However, that doesn’t mean you dont need the other forms and I personally believe taking large amounts of a single nutrient without its cofactors is never a good idea.

So instead, look for the following when buying a vitamin e supplement:

- it contains all 8 vitamin e forms. There are 4 tocopherols (alpha, beta, gamma and delta), and 4 tocotrienols (alpha, beta, gamma and delta).
- it is not made of soybean/canola/sunflower/flaxseed oil because they are not stable at high temps, which these supplements often undergo during processing.
- is made of red palm oil, rice oil or rice bran
- a quality product will have anywhere between 100 and 400 iu but more is not always better so dont be fooled by potency claims: 1 mg alpha-tocopherol equals 1,49 IU vitamin E. The other 3 tocopherols and all 4 tocotrienols allow much lower vitamin E claims, with 1 mg being only around 0,04 IU of vitamin E.